Severed
by Tiggy Malvern
Summary: Sands and El had an agreement. Now the deal's come due. Fifth in the 'Wires' series, and still slash.


_Characters and concepts are Robert Rodriguez', words are mine. Many thanks for beta help to Ms Anon and Nico, yet again.  
_

* * *

The thump of a heavy man hitting the foot-worn stone reverberates for close to a second between the buildings before it dies back.

It's almost surprising, how quiet a street can be following that sound, even after so many years of causing it.

He slides his own guns away, barrels cool and scentless against the leather, watches as Sands stretches a boot out forwards, toeing thoughtfully at the corpse.

"I think he's dead," El tells him. Five rounds to the chest will do that.

Sands tips his head toward the buildings; for a moment it's as if he sees the ten or more people half-watching from inside windows and behind walls, before he turns back to El with a smile. "And I think it's time we left."

He doesn't just mean this place. It's too obvious to hide this time, too public for money to stop it.

El turns, and the skitter-crunch of a stone chip is sharp beneath his heel.

The silence clings around him as he walks, thick and yielding when he presses through it, the numbed stillness of the watchers flashed far ahead by its tremors. His footsteps float with it, the thud and muted ring carried on the wave of desert-dense air rippling ever outwards, so much faster than the steady, unhurried strides he takes.

Sands is there with him, close, tight, the tap of his boots almost lost in El's, matched and perfect.

Sands won't let people know he doesn't need the cane as long as El is there, one more advantage concealed among a hundred others. That doesn't matter now.

El walks on, and neither man needs to see behind to know what's there.

His feet find the crosswalk at the corner and follow its lines instinctively, the traffic a hum through his head numbed beneath the song of his senses, a mundanity registered and dismissed. Sands' presence plays through his awareness, the bass line for a melody held back, a threat that doesn't yet follow.

The car hides in his sight, like so many others, waiting in a kerbside row like so many others.

The keys are in his hand, the plastic warm from his pocket and lightly dimpled as he triggers the cascade of locks. No signalling bleep or blink, not for them, the car muted on purchase like the others before it, and Sands hears the low thunk of it anyway, separating away from him in steps that clash jumping along El's nerves, finding the door with the barest brush of fingers.

Inside, it's almost normal, the soft flare and mutter of the cylinders, the steady ticking of the turn signal over the rattling disrepair of a passing car. But Sands has a gun in his hand, and a faint curl of smile, and the air congeals to a sulphurous spike in El's nose.

The gap in the traffic approaches in his mirrors, and he pulls away to lose them both in the normality.

It's less than a mile to the apartment, worth the drive only because they were buying groceries. Neither of them likes carrying bags any distance, worse for Sands who has only one gun hand free from the cane.

Everything had fractured before they'd paid for things they wouldn't now need.

Beside him, Sands uncoils, and ejects the clip from the Glock. The barrel's tip stretches out as El watches him, reflection distorted in the black of the plastic where it arcs around his face.

El slows, because there are ruts carved deep and ragged into the tarmac around the next curve, and the suspension's good like the rest of the car. No matter his reputation, he doesn't like risking damage reckless, without reason.

Sands reaches forward to the glove compartment, metallic snicks and chinks loud, sharp as he replaces the bullets spent from the clip. "We can be on a plane to São Paulo by five and then it's an overnight layover for the AeroMexico flight," he says, and his face is fixed forwards on the weapons.

El takes the second right to start the circuit of the block before he pulls in. There's nothing surprising in the statement - Sands knew the schedules for their most likely exit routes within days of arriving here, keeps them seasonally updated in his head.

El runs eyes over the apartment windows, the streets and buildings greyed and sprawling beneath the bulging layers of cloud, and there's nothing here to catch at his gaze and itch along his skin. He doesn't expect there to be. It will be many hours yet before the police persuade the first people that they're safe, and anyone begins to talk.

He pulls over to park.

El does most of the packing while Sands makes the calls and checks details with the websites that work with his software, a one-sided background of rapid questions and short demands. He puts the morning's mugs and plates inside the dishwasher and sets it going, takes a cloth and wipes down every hard surface - tables and chair backs and window frames, door handles and taps and toilet flush. The low patter of rain on the roof rises and strengthens, the fall of each drop lost in the massed, uneven roar of the whole.

Everything he brushes over is familiar; the chipped corner of a nightstand, the rattle-snag-slide of a drawer opened to clean inside, all the cheap laminate hallmarks of rented furniture. He knows the floorboard that creaks in the doorway and the hinge that gives with a slight hitch as he opens the closet.

The words flow from the next room in a voice light and broken that circles the back of his mind.

He curls the cloth soft into his palm, draws it the length of each rail in the bed-head where fingers cling when the sex is hard and aching.

He likes this place, but there's no drag of it now in the abrupt reality of leaving. It isn't the place, only what it held and represented, a calm and the absence of running, and they will find that again somewhere else.

The staccato rhythm of speech drops out of his head, and Sands is in the doorway, fingers of one hand still wrapped around the closed cell, the other brushing tips light over the doorframe. El wonders if Sands realises how very often he does that, reaches for the solidity of his surroundings rather than live only in the precision of the maps in his head. It seems the kind of thing Sands would change if he knew.

El sees and stays quiet, leaves Sands with his touchstones.

"You done?" Sands' tone is as clipped as his words.

"Almost."

He wipes over the doorframe again as he leaves.

He settles the guitar into its case, the wood warm and polished-slick against his palms. He turns each peg, watches the strings slacken and deform across its surface as it loses its purpose, falls into a mockery of itself, incapable of music. The click of the catches when the lid seals it from view is so very final.

He lifts the case to swing gently alongside him, bag of clothes and bullets over his other shoulder.

"The storage is in Recoleta, two blocks over from Del Chaco," Sands says, picking up his own bag and moving to the door.

"Wait."

Sands stops, turns, as El knows he will, because he always does, always listens when El speaks. Once he's listened, he's as likely to continue his course unchanged as to be swayed, but... he listens.

This time, El has nothing to say.

He reaches out, his fingers following the smooth plastic of frame into the sweep of Sands' hair. He eases the glasses forward, slides a thumb beneath, tracing the broken, ridged edges of scars.

Sands is still beneath the touch, unreacting till he drops his hand.

"If you're done, we need to leave before our visitors come calling." The words should glide in the shadow of a raised eyebrow, but the tones are missing, and Sands' face is blank as he steps away.

The stairs and walls echo, concrete and tile close, loud, as El follows Sands down.

The drive to the lock-up is short, filled with the rumble of traffic and the chatter of people from the sidewalks and the radio that Sands turns on as soon as El starts the engine. The speakers shiver at low frequency, a buzz trapped behind the heavy, slamming beats of Latin rap, and neither man moves to change the station.

The facility is quiet, and El parks by the unit number Sands give him, nobody to see them go inside, what they take and what they don't. Most things they'd rented with the apartment, but Sands has brought the AeroPress coffee maker he'd insisted on buying because it was simple, and gave him what he wanted quickly. Sands can be so flawlessly patient, entirely deliberate and careful with his plans, but the restraint is necessity. When there's a choice, Sands wants everything now.

They won't be back to live in Asunción, but the city lies on the border. The payments will be made automatically from one of Sands' side accounts, and the things they leave here don't have to be lost for good.

They work always with the possibilities.

They leave their holsters and most of the weapons, holding back only one handgun each. They'll lose those outside the airport.

El sets the guitar down last, laying the case carefully onto a blanket, extra protection from the heat-shifting bite of concrete through the wait. The delicate shaping of the wood, the precise tension of perfectly wound strings, they wouldn't survive Mexico unmarred.

Nothing ever does.

Back in the car, Sands is stilled beside him, his throat stretched and exposed with the tilt of his head back onto the rest. He might be sleeping as they crawl the city's outskirts, but his breathing runs too deep, too regular, the line of his jaw drawn too square to be truly relaxed. El sees, and knows Sands is teasing loose the ends from some complex knot of ideas and plans.

That can be either intriguing or dangerous; occasionally, when Sands chooses to suppress his own reckless streak that dances and plays and laughs among the risk, it is both.

He wonders what tangled circle of thoughts Sands is trapped in, returning to the source of his own destruction, while El is going home. Going back to Mexico, to the people who took everything from him, and finally drove him from his homeland.

He shapes the words in his head as he shifts his hands on the wheel to make the turn, reaches to taste them on his tongue, and they slip past his teeth with all the texture of refried beans and are gone.

The radio plays on, segued now into something with more traditional grounding, less intrusive, and he's barely aware of it over the rising tones of the engines, the increasing flow of traffic as the roads widen and spread. He's more aware of the itching wrongness of his body, the emptiness at his hips and wrists and down his spine, the absence of clinging straps and metallic weight. The only leather that creaks around him is the seat curved along his back as he twists to check the blind spot left by imperfect mirrors.

Sands' face holds those same defined lines, sharp like pencil strokes around his lips, but something switches direction inside. The barest twitch along a cheekbone, quick shiver through the skin below the dark curve of frame, and he's nearer to something now, some decision or some answer. He isn't turned towards El, obvious and pointless, but the angle of his head is altered, tipped slightly his way, fingers hooked unmoving in his lap, attention drawn close with the same focus that finds El's cues when they fight.

Some part of what's in his head is El; a part big enough that Sands isn't able to hide it. Or maybe he just doesn't want to. Doesn't need to.

Sands is waiting while he thinks, so El waits too, and there's no tension.

The heaviest of the clouds are drifting, scattering, raising the ceiling of grey into something hazier as he drives, more open and nebulous. The faded white lines of a crosswalk roll beneath the wheels and are lost behind.

He knows when Sands is going to speak, the moment of ease all through his body as he shifts out of thought into something more natural, the quick breath that feeds the words. "You know, El, I find myself wondering about something a little, and you appreciate how I hate to leave my curiosity unsatisfied. So while we've got some time to pass here, why don't you fill me in on what exactly made you think you were in love with Carolina?"

El talks about her sometimes. It isn't so often Sands brings her into their conversations, and he wonders now where Sands is headed with this. "I didn't think it, I knew," he corrects softly.

Sands circles a hand lazily through the air. "Fine, however you want to phrase it. What made you know?"

Everything. He'd wanted to be with her, and known he wouldn't ever change his mind. He'd wanted to touch her, wanted to protect her, wanted to talk to her and make her happy, and... none of that was what had made it love.

"She made me want to change." Something so simple - she'd asked him to stop, to give up the grief and revenge for Domino, as friends had asked of him so many times, but for her he'd done it. Become the man she wanted him to be.

It had given him peace, for a time.

He looks again at Sands, looks at the man beneath the image, the layers of carefully chosen clothing.

He sees a murderer. He sees a man who protected a child.

He's never asked Sands about that day, about the details, but he knows enough now, because he knows Sands. If the boy had helped him, had kept to the terms of whatever bargain had been struck, Sands would have deemed it... irrational to drag the child under with him, into his own hell. And for all that he does, Sands considers himself a rational man. He pulled an innocent deep into the devastated web he created, along with so many others less worthy of the word, but he equally defended him from the darkest consequences.

El had thought, after Carolina, that he wouldn't find his peace again. And yet the last months have been - not the same, never the same, but there are hints, shapes in his life that swirl and vanish and recur, and sometimes he can almost believe it will hold.

He turns away from the man in the car, the road taking his gaze, the cracks and hollows in its surface glistening dark and reflective from the earlier rain.

He should have done this so many years ago. Should have gone away with Carolina, and they would both be alive still, his belovedly haunting wife, his beautiful, perfect daughter, maybe other children too. It would have been so easy, such a simple thing to have kept everything he'd loved and wanted.

But neither of them had wanted to leave. And neither of them had known.

He hadn't wanted to leave this time either. Had agreed knowing it to be temporary, that leaving his home wasn't an irrevocable choice.

Knowing he would be back, and Sands with him.

And now he's going back, and they're words in his head, not a calling in his veins.

He makes the turn onto the highway, long shape of the pedal pressed against his toes, and he changes up fast through the gears.

He thinks it would have been more once, back when he believed he could actually win; that at some point what he did would make a difference, to the world, maybe even to himself.

Back before he ever woke to the darkness with the muscles cramped rigid in his calves, with the aching stretched tense down his spine.

There's so little left now of what he used to believe. There are times he looks over his life and he feels like a man groping between floorboards and behind sofa cushions, fully aware of going through the motions for something long lost, but still desperate enough to try.

More often, he feels like the man in a movie looking at the bomb and wondering which wire to cut, seeing the strands divide irretrievably beneath the blades in his mind.

There are always more wires to cut.

The signs flash past, telling him just seven kilometres to Silvio Pettirosi airport.

His speed is constant, holding with the traffic in the inside lane, a little under the limit.

It should be night now, in his head, lights slicing a trail as the dark closes in, wrapping tight around glass and metal, holding them separate from the world. It's only afternoon, and overcast, the sky a flat not-white stretching high overhead, spreading back through his mirrors, and so very ordinary.

The painted lines roll broken alongside the wheels, channeling, endless.

He wonders if it's ever possible - to give up all the remnants of his past, his vengeance.

He's done it before, but it wasn't his choice. He did it because Carolina asked him to, needed him to.

His mind and his eyes slide back compulsively to Sands.

El is no connoisseur of men. He's never looked at them with an eye to beauty as he has with women, that instinctive first glance that glides over features and curves and ankles. But he sees how the lines of Sands' face work together, the arrowed profile of his nose, the balanced sweep of cheekbones and jaw. With the scarring concealed, Sands should be considered attractive, could draw looks on the streets and in grocery stores. And he does, sometimes, but then the eyes flick away again, because there's something else there too, something pinched and impassive in Sands' expression that tells too much of what's missing in the man beneath.

Sands will never ask. Sands is with him because of who he is, wants the part of him that is El Mariachi. The man he's about to become again.

The road is always there, leading him somewhere different, whether he wants to go or not. He doesn't remember the last time a decision felt like a choice.

He and Carolina had settled in the village because flight had ended there. Because there was so little in that place that few visitors came, except those who wanted to buy a guitar. It had never mattered, the absence of world and past and everything that had shaped him, because everything he needed was already there, in Carolina, and then in his daughter.

He gave it all up for Carolina, and it was worth it, so worth it, every moment while it lasted.

There isn't so much point in giving it up now for a man who would only deride the attempt.

Everything hums and swishes around him, a wall of tyres on wet, of high-geared and low-revving engines, of radio chatter and dissolving static. Everything snaps and buzzes in his head, the knowledge and awareness, what he has, what he is, what he's leaving, where he's going.

Beside him, Sands' fingers are restless over the fabric at his knees, another chord to the chorus, another layer to the sound that speaks.

The signs for the airport are there, steering him right, and he follows the highway straight on to wherever it leads.

There are hills near Asunción, climbing away from the river all around, low and rolling now across three of his horizons. The jagged, isolated peaks lie dotted sparsely among them, rising stark, bare against the clouds. The highway will curl towards one for a while, but it will veer away before it gets too close, will never touch.

It's a choice, his choice, and he's making it, slicing the wire clean, and sure it's the right one; he won't live the life of bullets, of fear, of waking every day to no certainties and no home.

He doesn't make it for Sands, though Sands is an inevitable part of it now.

He makes it for himself. He wants to keep it this time, this once, hold on to what he has.

His skin prickles and lifts beneath the layers of his clothes, the weave of his shirt resting harsh on his flesh, because his choice can only be the start of it. For now there's the waiting, the tension his body knows and greets all too well, but El can't plan for this, can't predict, not like Sands.

He reaches for the climate controls, pressing buttons to raise the temperature inside.

They're heading steadily north and east, away from the border. He doesn't know where this road goes, though there are signs. Apparently they're going towards a place called Arroyos y Esteros, whatever that's like.

If they don't like it, there are other places beyond.

Sands' face is set, expressionless, his head shifting bare centimetres with the sounds seeping in through the glass, all his attention seeming strung in spokes outside the car. El knows if he only moves in his seat, Sands will be entirely back with him.

He follows the trail of cars out into the deeper country, steady pressure of one pedal beneath his boot, and he is still.

The airport turn-off is some ten kilometres behind them before Sands speaks, words dry and dusty and deadly as their Mexico. "I thought we'd left behind the unilateral decision-making stage of this partnership a while back, El."

El leaves his eyes set on the road, on the lines. "It seemed that way," he admits.

"So I take it you'll be filling me in any time now on why exactly we're headed away from the airport."

"I'm only making choices for me," El tells him, and the truth draws the tension along every muscle. "You will always make your own." He knows of only one man at one time who has ever taken Sands' choices from him. He can't imagine another.

"Except for the inconvenient part you seem to be forgetting where I'm sitting in the same car." Sands' tone hasn't changed or lightened, and the prickling's back in El's skin, moving over his body in slow-creeping waves, the knowledge of _wrongness_ when he feels it all start to fold in around him, collapsing like cardboard.

"If you decide you want to leave," he says, and it's slow, stilted, sifting through the words so carefully, "I'll take you where you want to go. That hasn't changed." It has to sound like what it is, the statement of truth, nothing like hint or suggestion, nothing he might want.

"Well, decision making's a little complicated right now, seeing how I'm not so sure where we're going or why." Sands' speech is slowing too, sprawling out long and lazy, and that's the warning sign flashing in him, when anyone else's words would be starting to snap.

El can draw out this discussion perhaps another five minutes' travel along this highway, delay for another few swift kilometres gained, and it won't change Sands' choices.

He twists his eyes away from the road to look at Sands, and the blank stare of the glasses swings round instantly to meet him, the features surrounding equally moulded and flat.

Sands hasn't turned that emptiness his way for - he can't remember, can't even guess - and all those tiny prickles flash together into a single spiking urge, the need to stretch across and do whatever it takes to change it, change it into _anything._ "How is it important to you? What is there left now in Mexico that matters?" El's fingers are claws, hooked onto the too-smooth arc of the wheel, clinging against the frustration, the urge to curl into a fist and smash into plastic, watch it crack, satisfying and painful. He hears his own voice changing, rising to ring through his ears and he doesn't even want to stop it. "Why do you want so badly to go back?"

Sands gives a brief, twitching smile, lips closed and curling together. "Actually, I don't. But it was part of the deal when we came here."

There's a moment when all El can do is stare.

"You don't want to go," he says, and there's something stupid in repeating it, but –

Sands shrugs and turns away, reaching inside his jacket for his cigarettes. "I've given you my opinion of your goat shit country often enough, I'd have thought you'd have gotten the idea by now."

Sands insults so many things with predictable frequency, but El doesn't bother saying it because there's nothing like enough of his attention on the road, on the curve of the lines into a long, slow bend and the buzz of the blue Chevy pick-up alongside, the cars around filled with people driving home from their jobs like they do every day, and Sands doesn't want to go. _Sands doesn't want to go_, and he didn't say it, not until El asked.

There's an exit ramp signed ahead and he peels away with it, follows it down through the arc and pulls over to stop by the rows of concrete pillars supporting the highway above. The low hum of cars and the deeper rumble of trucks enclose them when he turns off the engine, tones dragged down through the stone and sealed in the reverberating space beneath.

"This doesn't sound much like an airport," Sands says, and it's nothing close to the teeth of minutes before, words deep and alive now with layers relaxed and easy beneath the bite.

"Most people don't stand around in airports discussing where to go," El points out, and he feels the quirk in his own lips with the amusement. "It's normal to know before you get there."

"Well, we know that, there's a flight to La Paz leaving at six forty-three. And I'm not talking about Baja." No hesitation, no hint of a pause to think, and this is something else Sands has planned in advance, because it might be needed.

El considers that, watching Sands grope around in his right pocket, the cigarette hanging loose from his lip in a coil of smoke. "I thought there were going to be no more one-sided decisions."

Sands' head lifts towards him then, a sharp tilt to his eyebrows. "Does it matter?"

Wherever they go, it won't be Mexico, and there's still the part of him that mourns it, but the much greater part is only relief. "No."

Sands aims him a quick, flippant smile across his shoulder. "Then Bolivia works for me." He clicks open his cell phone, dialing with faultless fingers. "I'll have the weapons delivery waiting outside the airport."

The conversation is short, precise, as El expects it to be. Sands uses words as an art form, spinning and weaving persuasion in speeches that are half taunt, half irresistible challenge, but when the deal is struck and only the details remain, he becomes stark-lined efficiency, clipped of all stagecraft and mannerisms. The man on the other end of the line must know the name Sands gives him, though it's not one he's ever used for their carefully prepared papers, and Sands flicks the cigarette from the window and snaps the phone closed minutes later with a fast, satisfied smile. "Now all we need to do is make the flight." His curving lips lengthen into something closer to anticipation, expectation. "And we seem to be left with an extra couple of hours hanging loose we didn't account for."

Sands is unbuckling his seatbelt with fast, sure touch, swinging out of his seat and across, cursing fluidly as the lining of his jacket snags on the parking brake, and El has reason to be grateful for every centimetre of space between him and the steering wheel as Sands squeezes before it to kneel over his thighs. And in moments that's forgotten and he's grateful for other things entirely as Sands dips his head to find El's jaw with mobile lips that trace a path to El's own, and then it's all taste and warmth and the steady slide of tongues, damp and eager.

It's over before El's ready to lose it, always, because Sands will kiss, but he doesn't work with it as an end in itself, won't ever hold and indulge the sensation before he moves on. There's a jingling rattle as Sands pulls away, some part of him catching at the keys hanging from the ignition. Sands still wears that premeditating smile as El looks up at him, his head tipped forward only slightly where his hair brushes at the roof, and El decides then there are advantages to Sands' refusal to buy economy cars, his insistence on furnishing the image.

Sands' hand is at the collar of El's jacket, fingers curling back onto his neck so that he shivers, his whole body wanting to stretch and coil into those few centimetres of skin.

"We're stopped right off the highway," he says, and Sands isn't going anywhere with the press of El's hand along his thigh.

Sands tips his head at the statement of the obvious, speaking over the muted swish of another passing car. "So I hear."

"You don't care?"

Sands grins, his lips a crooked curve rising towards the arc of the glasses. "If we were inside city limits in a thirty zone, the audience would get a much better look."

"They'll see enough."

"Enough to know some guy got lucky." Sands leans in a little, fingers pressing tighter at El's neck, his other hand tugging and sliding now at El's belt as his voice glides lower. "Enough to make them wish it was them."

El remembers months when he didn't speak of sex outside the night's urgency, when he barely risked touch beyond the bounds of bed and dark. And now Sands smiles down at him with lips and hands demanding, and all the lines are gone.

El reaches for the levers at the edge of his seat, his body pressing back as it tilts and drops the extra few centimetres, giving them space, and there's no part of him wanting to stop Sands' fingers because Sands is right, and what's outside doesn't matter.

The cars buzz past in a rush of beating wind, flashing glimpses of shapes and faces within if El cares to look, and people will see what they expect to see, what they want to see, as they always do. With the shadowing concrete flared overhead, the simple jacket and the hair hanging forward around Sands' face as he dips his head, if they want to see a man making love with a woman, then they will.

Sands has fingers inside El's jacket now, flowing smooth over his shirt, and El arches to feel the palm press down onto his chest, because Sands is blind, with all that implies, but sometimes El's sure he's the one who needs the touch more.

"Christ, El, could you be any more tense?" And Sands is sarcastic, but he's holding the pressure, kneading now with fingers hooked firm over El's ribs.

"Probably not," he admits. This day, this whole day, starting with everything that has become his normality, seeing it shatter again in the briefest bullet moments, the way it always was; only this time he can piece it back together, keep a semblance close enough to what he wants.

"See, that's what you get for not doing the crazy talking thing. It could've been so easy, just, 'Hey, Sands, you mind if we skip on Mexico this time around?' and 'Sure, fine by me, how about Bolivia?' and we could've passed on the whole dramatic brooding and mystery and parking in an underpass angle." Sands isn't so relaxed himself, a strain lingering through muscle and tendons and spine as El brushes hands over him that denies the casual sweep of his words.

"But I'd be standing in line at an airport check-in, instead of parked in an underpass with your hand in my pants about to bring me off," El points out.

Sands' eyebrows flash above the plastic, and one edge of his lip twitches and curls. "Who says I'm using my hand?"

El looks up at him, feels his own expression shift to match. "I don't care so much what you use." And he doesn't care, beyond the feel of Sands' thighs over his own and the parted clothes and the _skin _beneath his fingers, because this is what he's needed through the whole stretching expanse of the afternoon. This is what he wants, would have made his choice so much easier, so much faster, and then he thinks maybe that's a part of why Sands held himself so distant. _'This deal really only works if you choose it for yourself.'_ Sands has said it before, that El has to make the big decisions alone, or they won't hold, and El can trust Sands completely because they both know it's true.

Sands has El's cock free of his clothes now, the air in this space warm and heavy, no shock of chill at the exposure, just the stripping of a confinement unwanted in the drag of desire. Sands leans in, shifting his hips to press them together through the layers of his own fabric, and Sands still carries a trace of gunpowder sharp over the shampoo and smoke and the faded sweat; that's been rare these last months, but when they first became lovers it was always that way, and it doesn't feel wrong now. And maybe it _should_ feel wrong, but it doesn't stop El wanting, can't keep El's hands from Sands' clothes and the stretching flesh beneath, won't stop his erection hardening and readying into familiar, dry fingers.

Sands reaches out left-handed, flipping open one of the compartments in the centre dash and groping inside to find lubricant that El hadn't known was there. He's always occupied with driving when they're in the car, and it falls to Sands to check the ammunition and painkillers are stocked up for when they're needed - obviously he's been making some additions.

Sands is fully hard with a damp, sticky trail clinging to his clothing as El pushes it aside, already there after one brief kiss and some fumbling with fabric. Always Sands' body gives him away, what his face and his words would conceal, and sex between them veered long ago from the want of someone's touch to the want of each other, desire triggered mentally, lust in a glance or a thought. El's own arousal flares bright through his brain and balls with the knowledge that Sands was anticipating this while he bargained on the phone, seduction planned all through that clipped conversation.

Sands lifts slightly from El's thighs, wriggling interestingly over him as his hands join El's in pressing his clothes down to his knees, and it's a good thing Sands wears styles cut loose to hide the guns, or this wouldn't work at all. The bare, clinical scent of oil rises between them, heavy in El's head as Sands trickles it over his fingers and reaches low behind him. El can't see, not from here, with Sands leaning into him, forced close by the limits of space, but the motions hide nothing and El's memories spark in the knowing, the memories and the need, and he pushes his fingers around to join Sands', gathering slickness from him to spread between them.

A horn blasts into his head, sudden, sharp, twice more as El jumps and jerks round to follow the sound, briefly finds the man leering from the cab of the pick-up that takes the curving ramp more slowly than the cars. When he pulls his attention back inside, Sands is grinning down at him. "Told you they'd be jealous," he says, and El doesn't get as far as an answer because Sands has an oiled hand on his cock, steadying him while he slides down onto him, heat and stretch and delicious friction, and El reaches up a hand to tilt Sands' head further through the lingering smoke and meet him and kiss him instead.

There are times when Sands seems entirely perfect. Times when everything's immediacy and instinct, both of them wanting the same thing at the same moment, moving together in flawless alignment to get it, and the feeling's the same whether it's the fighting or the fucking that brings it. El knows the truth of it, knows the long times between, watching Sands, waiting for those moments he releases the checks, lets the viciousness loose; knows how very far Sands is from anyone's ideal. But El's conscious mind has little input when Sands is pressed up against him and around him, when there are lips and tongue and teeth working smoothly with his own and just as hungry, and he knows how it is to have the months spiral past and become years with no-one there to reach out and touch just because, no-one to turn to and smile when something amuses him, and his fingers curl deeper into the weave of Sands' jacket.

Sands breaks the kiss in favour of movement, lifting away from El, his head down and his shoulders curving forwards beneath the roof, and this isn't a small car, but Sands has one knee wedged between El's hip and the door, the other hanging half off the edge of El's seat alongside the parking brake. Sands reaches for the handle above the door, using it to help raise his weight alongside the constricted muscles of his thighs, and for a moment El misses the touch at his shoulder, the fingers curled beneath his hair onto his neck. But it can only be a moment, because Sands pushes fast back down onto him, around him, and it's so much that's hot and good and his, and it's everything he can want.

There's no pause this time - it can't be so comfortable like this, Sands won't take it slow, and it's better this way, this time, and Sands' other hand tightens down at El's hip for the push upwards, fingers filling the gap there, the emptiness that calls for the weight of a weapon. Sands works through the awkwardness of the position, finds a rhythm he can keep so El can move with him, curving his shoulders into the seat and lifting his hips to meet him each time until Sands' weight presses him back to the shape of the leather. There's a jab down his spine as he hunches for the angle and a numbness along his thighs where Sands' calves cling and push, and El can't hold it, can't begin to hold it, too much of what he wants, what he needs, peeling back the stress through all its layers, leaving him breathless and shivering as he pulls Sands down onto him, along him, and grips him when he comes.

His head drops forward to rest against Sands' chest, shirt button raised and sharp on his cheekbone above the damp of the fabric. His hand loosens and slides from Sands' bicep onto his back and around him.

He should keep going, keep moving with Sands, but he's not going to last through it this time, softening too fast, losing the sensation of tautness from Sands' body around him. His hand is on Sands' erection, working him already without thought, Sands arching back along the angle of the steering wheel so the horn screams out to slice the air around them as his head presses onto the windscreen, his hair flattened across the glass, and it's good for Sands, yes, but it's not what it should be, not this time.

He puts his hand to Sands' waist, the other still wrapped around behind, and his cock falls easily from Sands' body as he lifts him. "Christ, El, what the fuck are you doing? Because whatever it is, you've got shitty timing." Sands' words ring loud, dropped into the near-silence left after the horn, but Sands is pushing up anyway, working with El as he snakes out from under him, clothes sliding and squeaking over the leather. El snags a pocket on the stick, and Sands curses sharp when he smacks an elbow on the door, but Sands ends up pressed into the seat where El wants him.

"That better have been worth it," Sands warns, and El catches the edge of his own smile flashing in the lenses as he answers. "I think you'll let me know." He wriggles down, knees finding the mat and feet hooking beneath the pedals, and he drops his head and takes Sands in, lips and tongue sliding over the salt of him, of sweat and fluid.

He's never found this... difficult. Strange, yes, a little awkward at first to control tongue and teeth together, but oddly easy. Easy when he thought of Carolina, of what he liked to feel, and sought to apply the same, because in this, at least, he and Sands seem to be alike. His memory feeds him the knowledge of how this can be, gives him the awareness of Sands' body, the reactions that go with each slight adjustment of pace and angle, and... he'd expected it at first to be only reciprocity, but it's not. Because he's found that this gives him Sands.

Doing this lets him have Sands loose and eager at his mouth and fingertips when El himself isn't so... distracted. Nothing else lets him _see_ so much of Sands, entirely relaxed with only the moment in his head, emptied so briefly of schemes and plans while he takes the sensation, and when El's own head is down and his eyes closed against the prickle of hair at Sands' groin, his hands see and read it for him.

He can't work so low this time, from this angle and with Sands sitting, his forehead pressing into the folds of shirt over Sands' stomach, but Sands is more sensitive around the tip anyway. El gets more from Sands with the quick, swirling strokes of his tongue and a taut, thin-lipped drag over the ridges than from mere sucking, and all that responsiveness is here for him now. His mouth teases and laps in short, repeated motions while his hands roam the long sprawl of Sands' body, pressing through and under fabric to feel the ripple and twitch of the muscle taut over his thigh, the rise of the sweat fresh among the hairs that curl in a line down his stomach. He wants to push fingers into Sands, sliding smooth into the slickness of oil and come, feel Sands shiver and press around him when he hits it perfect, his fingers more telling of the detail than his cock can ever be. It's impossible in this cramped space, the position they're forced to take, but the skin stretching tight and hollow over Sands' ribs when he breathes so deep is enough this once.

Leather creaks a complaint as Sands' fingers curl and hook, nails scraping blunt over the seat beside him, and his hips rise up to push deeper into El. And the quivering-hard erection and the bitter-salt flow within his mouth are only another part of Sands, and somehow that's been enough to shape them into something El wants, though before Sands, and even for some time after Sands, the thought of this act had threatened to freeze and seal his throat. He slides his lips lower now, feeling Sands pulse over his tongue, the damp weave of the shirt rubbing slow along his face, and he swallows simple and natural, as if he's always been with men, fitting himself perfectly to the insults that were flung at him by his enemies long before they were ever true.

He eases his mouth away when the fluid stops, before the sensitivity hits. He looks up to Sands' tipped-back head and parted lips, feels the slack spread of the muscle in the thighs beneath his palms, and wonders that people would expect him to find shame or regret in what he does. His life has always steered him unexpected places; that he could come to enjoy giving to a lover this way as much as any other is not so odd.

He reaches up to stroke a stray hair from Sands' cheek, where it curls too close to his mouth.

He knows this is his. If Sands had chosen differently, had gone on to Mexico without him - when he came back, he would have come back to El.

El is only surprised by the force of his own reaction to the thought, the denial of the weeks or months alone.

Another car flashes past in a thrum of engine and rushing air. The ridges of the mat are pressing hard into his knees.

Sweat and sex have overwhelmed the scent of guns.

El takes in Sands relaxed and entirely satisfied for one last moment before he calls him back. "Well, did I pass?"

Sands' head angles towards him with a considering smile as he pushes himself upright and rubs at his elbow. "Barely."

El sits straighter to give Sands space, and his shoulders meet the solid arc of the steering wheel. "So next time you decide you want sex in the car, you should pick somewhere that isn't the driver's seat," he says. He hunches a little and shuffles sideways, closer to the door, and pokes gently at Sands' thigh. "And now I need it back if you want to go anywhere more interesting than an underpass."

Sands pushes back at his hand, wriggling more in El's direction. "Fuck that, I'm taking the easy way round." Sands fixes his clothes and opens the door, lifts his knee to his chin to swing his foot up and across the seat in front of El, and gets out. He leaves the door open, which seems untidy and not like Sands, until El considers that in this cramped situation, Sands doesn't know for sure where his elbows and fingers might be.

Sands' fingertips point out from his thigh, tracing the edge of fenders and hood as he circles the car, and El slips into his seat and watches the movements, enthralled even after so long by how very natural he makes everything look.

There's a rush of air through the car as Sands opens the passenger door, smoke swept away in the intrusive humidity, and El shuts his own to kill the breeze. Sands drops in smooth, with practiced familiarity, buckles himself in with quick, sliding fingers and settles back into his seat. His hands rest on his lap, gently curled, the fabric beneath pulled taut against his thighs. His jacket is rumpled into creases along the line of his spine, his collar open and draped uneven at his throat.

The moments are stretching out in stillness, immobility, and Sands turns to face El's gaze, fixed on him because El doesn't want to look away.

"You didn't say anything either," El says.

Sands tips his head at him, curiosity in the line of his lips. "About what?"

"Mexico. That you didn't want to go."

Sands' grin flashes fast and entirely comfortable. "Well, compromise always works so much better when the other guy comes round to your way of thinking first."

"You expected it." El makes it statement more than question, and this time Sands' smile is closed-lipped and crooked.

"Not quite. I expected it to take longer."

El isn't sure he believes that. _What made you think you were in love with Carolina?_ But Sands often plays the longer odds.

Sands' head tilts a little further, his eyebrows curved into arches, exaggerated and dramatic. "Killing drug dealers, saving the President - you know there are all those stories out there making such a big deal of El Mariachi the patriot, they're a little hard to miss."

Sands doesn't believe any of that, not now if he ever did, but he knows no other way of asking.

El turns and looks ahead through the windscreen, watching after the cars that flow past in endless rows, rushing on to wherever it is they go. He could sit here forever, and they would be the same, day after day, unchanging. "I can't just go back to Mexico," he says. "If I go, I go back to everything."

The smile's back instantly, painted across Sands' face with the confidence. "So El Mariachi's finally gotten bored with mass murder." His voice drops to a not-whisper, conspiratorial and mocking. "You shouldn't let the word on that spread too far or people will start thinking the legendary hero's getting old."

El shakes his head briefly. Bored is nothing close to the right word - that's one thing out of so many that the killing has never been. "It's not who I want to be," he says.

Sands actually laughs then, a few short notes filling the car before the words roll out past it. "You think it's something you get a choice in? You think if you just say you won't be El Mariachi, that's it?" He leans into the space between the seats, the amusement dropped from his voice to leave tones low and velvet. "The instant someone threatens you or anything you want, you'll reach for a gun. And if there isn't a gun, you'll reach for a knife, or a bottle, or a goddamn coffee mug, and you'll find whatever way there is of killing them and you'll never be anything but glad you did it." Sands lounges back across his seat, still angled towards El, one elbow propped on the rest on the door. "You can't ever be anything else, _El_, because even if you never have to do it, if you never kill another soul and you live to be ninety, it's in there and it's not going away."

El watches the stretching clouds through the windscreen and says nothing, because it's all true, and he can't be anything but glad about that either. He can only wish he'd been better at it.

He will always defend, and the only way he knows, the only way for a man without power to protect against violence, is through the use of better, stronger, faster violence. His Carolina had never condemned that - the moment anyone came after her or hers, they deserved everything they got, in whichever ways it came to them, and he'd loved that about her, so much, among so many other reasons to love her. It was only the seeking, the hunting that she'd stood against.

It's only that he's turning away from now.

They'll take their flight, and when they reach the other end, the guns will be back with his body and the itch will be gone from his skin.

He slides his seat back to its normal position, reaches out to the keys still hanging from the ignition, and starts the engine. Dials the temperature down before he makes a left at the lights at the end of the ramp and swings the car around to take the entrance back onto the main highway, southbound. He checks his speed as the road crests, finds his gap and rejoins the flow of cars, faster in this direction, headed back towards Asunción.

The buzz of traffic settles in constant around them, the dull rumble of tyres on a road now nearly dry. Sands reaches forward to fiddle with the radio, flipping fast past most of the stations after just a few notes. "So I take it you can find your way to the airport without getting lost this time," he says.

El twists his hand on the wheel, his sleeve falling back as he checks his watch, and considers. It's perhaps not entirely without risk now, but it's nothing to the level of danger and loss he's just rejected.

The Glock pulls heavy inside his jacket and his body crackles with a hum and a sway that's close to joy. "Maybe not the first time," he says. "We might find ourselves back in the city first."

The look Sands sends his way is sharp with questions, but nothing of refusal, and El is already smiling when he answers. "I'm going to need my guitar."


End file.
